Class structure -- Class formation -- Consent, coercion, and resignation -- Agency, contingency, and all that -- How capitalism endures.

“A quite thorough and impressive work, not only a compelling defense of materialism but also a fair-minded if highly critical engagement with cultural theory. It isn’t clear how culturalists—especially the anti-Marxist ones—can effectively respond to this broadside, tightly and cogently argued as it is.”—Chris Wright, CounterPunch “Chibber...has developed a sophisticated, elegant, and readable defense of the sociological significance of class structure in understanding and addressing the key problems inherent in capitalism.”—Choice “[A] clear, compelling, and systematic statement of the view that class is an objective reality that predictably and rationally shapes human thought and action, one we need to grapple with seriously if we’re to comprehend contemporary society and its morbid symptoms.”—Jacobin Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, theorists argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture—that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, gross inequalities in wealth and power have pushed scholars to reopen materialist lines of inquiry. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the cultural turn never happened. Vivek Chibber instead engages cultural theory seriously, proposing a fusion of materialism and the most useful insights of its rival. Chibber accommodates the main arguments from the cultural turn within a robust materialist framework, showing how one can agree that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency while still recognizing the fundamental power of class structure and class formation. He vindicates classical materialism by demonstrating that it accounts for phenomena cultural theorists thought it was powerless to explain, while also showing that aspects of class are indeed centrally affected by cultural factors. The Class Matrix does not seek to displace culture from the analysis of modern capitalism. Rather, in prose of exemplary clarity, Chibber gives culture its due alongside what Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations.”

This book contains the notes of the lectures delivered at an Advanced Course on Combinatorial Matrix Theory held at Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) in Barcelona. These notes correspond to five series of lectures. The first series is dedicated to the study of several matrix classes defined combinatorially, and was delivered by Richard A. Brualdi. The second one, given by Pauline van den Driessche, is concerned with the study of spectral properties of matrices with a given sign pattern. Dragan Stevanović delivered the third one, devoted to describing the spectral radius of a graph as a tool to provide bounds of parameters related with properties of a graph. The fourth lecture was delivered by Stephen Kirkland and is dedicated to the applications of the Group Inverse of the Laplacian matrix. The last one, given by Ángeles Carmona, focuses on boundary value problems on finite networks with special in-depth on the M-matrix inverse problem.

A natural sequel to the author's previous book Combinatorial Matrix Theory written with H. J. Ryser, this is the first book devoted exclusively to existence questions, constructive algorithms, enumeration questions, and other properties concerning classes of matrices of combinatorial significance. Several classes of matrices are thoroughly developed including the classes of matrices of 0's and 1's with a specified number of 1's in each row and column (equivalently, bipartite graphs with a specified degree sequence), symmetric matrices in such classes (equivalently, graphs with a specified degree sequence), tournament matrices with a specified number of 1's in each row (equivalently, tournaments with a specified score sequence), nonnegative matrices with specified row and column sums, and doubly stochastic matrices. Most of this material is presented for the first time in book format and the chapter on doubly stochastic matrices provides the most complete development of the topic to date.

A groundbreaking introduction to vectors, matrices, and least squares for engineering applications, offering a wealth of practical examples.

An engaging introduction to vectors and matrices and the algorithms that operate on them, intended for the student who knows how to program. Mathematical concepts and computational problems are motivated by applications in computer science. The reader learns by "doing," writing programs to implement the mathematical concepts and using them to carry out tasks and explore the applications. Examples include: error-correcting codes, transformations in graphics, face detection, encryption and secret-sharing, integer factoring, removing perspective from an image, PageRank (Google's ranking algorithm), and cancer detection from cell features. A companion web site, codingthematrix.com provides data and support code. Most of the assignments can be auto-graded online. Over two hundred illustrations, including a selection of relevant "xkcd" comics. Chapters: "The Function," "The Field," "The Vector," "The Vector Space," "The Matrix," "The Basis," "Dimension," "Gaussian Elimination," "The Inner Product," "Special Bases," "The Singular Value Decomposition," "The Eigenvector," "The Linear Program" A new edition of this text, incorporating corrections and an expanded index, has been issued as of September 4, 2013, and will soon be available on Amazon.

This volume concisely presents fundamental ideas, results, and techniques in linear algebra and mainly matrix theory. Each chapter focuses on the results, techniques, and methods that are beautiful, interesting, and representative, followed by carefully selected problems. For many theorems several different proofs are given. The only prerequisites are a decent background in elementary linear algebra and calculus.